ProjectLink Capability

Hello Chrystal.

PJL is a large topic but to make it short, I love it. It is not prefect (at least with 9.1) but it is so far the most comprehensive project management systems I have used.

You can manage in one single area your project plan, your documents, (CAD or non CAD), your deliverables, your meetings (functionalities could be greatly improve), your resources, and much more.

My company has not yet integrated PJL into their processes to manage project so I am using my role in my company to manage real project with it to demonstrate how powerful it is).

I like the fact that I do not need to keep maintaining and updating the project plan. I am very strict with my activities owners so they update their statuses several times a week and as a consequence the status of the progress is acurate while giving me very little work.

You can keep everything together in ProjectLink and know why such decision was made etc....

You also have a review and approval process of document. This is also very good.

I have never used (just played with it) the automatic execution option of the project. when I create a project it is always with manual execution.

Even if the discussion forum could have a much better look and better functionalities, it does the job and we also use it often.

The meetings are also good. I tend to organize all the project meeting from ProjectLink.

Managing the assignments is also pretty efficient. The way we tend to work is so. An activity is created and an owner is assigned with resources. The owner will then create in the activity the actions for his resources. So we all know who does what and for what.

It is easy to quickly review how many actions are pending, by who and/or per activities.

The document manager is also powerful, one could ask why you cannot revised document in a project, well it is possible in Windchill 10 but I am not sure it is a good idea.....

The manager has als great flexibility to control and manage the security. This is great as sometime people do not need to see too many documentation. just what they need. We need to learn to set properly OIR because at the moment, managing the security if we do not want the same for all members, we have to play quite a lot with the manage security.

They are certain functionalities missing, such as mass update (for instance you want to push the finish dates of several activities at once, copy paste, costing in different currencies does not work. I still have not figured out how to use the utilisation of resources correctly. When it says 100% does it mean 100% of his working hours to my project ? what about resources having different working hours, I have some working 5 days a week some working 6 days a week. I am not impressed with the Calendar either) The meetings could be improved for instance, we cannot ticked who participants attended or not. The minutes are just a simple text box and it is limited in size, so we often end up writting. See minutes attached in the notebook and we upload a word file)

I could be talking about PJL for hours. He has not simplified my life a lot but also provide the project team great visibility of the project progress, activities etc....

I hope this is enough information.

Please do not hesitate to ask further 🙂

PS: Notebook, in meetings yes, in EPMDocument or WTpart or WTdocument pages, not really, it is not something you can search for, iterate etc.... As a personal notebook. I do mainly for links, a bit like favorites in Internet Explorer

I wrote

I meant, He has not ONLY simplified my life a lot ......

Like NacNac, we’ve also quickly became big fans of Windchill ProjectLink. For our implementation, we received some consulting assistance and imported most of our MS ProjectPlan for both simplified (3 phase) and complex (5 phase) new product development. The end result was that ProjectLink had much of the look and feel of our existing MS Project plans without the onerous overhead. It also automatically creates a workspace context for each project so the product data is closely coupled to the project.

I think ProjectLink is the gem of PTC Windchill PLM environment and moves your project managers from continuously statusing each
project to managing by exception. Everything goes much smoother in ProjectLink. Project statuses are much more accurate and easier to validate and the product development teams don’t have to sit through hours and hours of project status meetings.